The Riverina Story: Water, Wine and Wealth

(Paperback)

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Barry Gray tells how a once-desolate area of New South Wales became a thriving agricultural region through the addition of managed water resources. In particular it focuses on the grape growers and their contribution to a developing wine industry. The Riverina, and in particular the Mirrool Irrigation Area, is the only major wine-producing district of Australia which to date has not been written about in depth. This book addresses many of the serious problems currently being experienced Australia wide -- water conservation, salinity and declining rural productivity. It shows the potential impact of rising water tables which bring with them destructive levels of salt which destroy all agriculture, and highlights how this killer of crops was completely eliminated from the Mirrool by tile drainage, a method by which other irrigation areas maybe protected from the devastation wrought by salinity. The book is structured around the themes of cultural history, wine history, multiculturalism, rural/regional development, and water conservation and salinity. It covers the settlement of the region by soldier settlers after both world wars, the oral history of the Italian and other pioneers of the district, and the early history of winemaking, which included placing blocks of ice in the vats to maintain temperature control. These themes are tied together by reference to the social and historical forces affecting Australia and the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.